The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with Abeer Hoque

By Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Why do you write?

I can’t say it’s because I must. I’m privileged in that I have been trained to do many things (making spreadsheets, balancing budgets, editing, organising), and some of those things keep me housed and fed, happy even. I write (on the side, obsessively, as a career) because it makes me feel more satisfied than pretty much anything else I know how to do. I get intense pleasure from both the process and the end game. It took me a while to understand that liking to do something was important, more important than being good at something else. It’s definitely not an Asian immigrant thing to follow the joyous light but I’m a bit of a hedonist, so I got there eventually J.

Tell us about your most recent book or writing project. What were you trying to say or achieve with it?

My earlier work had to do with a kind of recording. My memoir, “Olive Witch,” is experiential, about what it was like for me as a Bangladeshi girl in Nigeria, a Nigerian born teenager in America, an American woman in Bangladesh. My linked stories collection, “The Lovers and the Leavers,” is loosely based on my own diasporic experiences and the stories of those I met while living in Bangladesh and India. My work in my latest project is a little bit different, more like trying to answer questions rather than tell stories. I just finished a draft of a novel called “Memory Alone.” In a way, it’s completely fictional, following the life of a white bisexual religious male drug addict in California. In a way, it’s the truth of what I imagine and wonder about relationships, addiction, memory, and dementia.